Hang the rich

17 06 2013

Economists should just butt the fuck out of politics. Jesus.

I know, I know: As a good social scientist I’m supposed to say nice things about econometrics and all of the EXCITING! PROVOCATIVE! insights they have to offer the study of politics, but, y’know, I’m not a particularly good social scientist so why not go with that?

Er. . . anyway. Gregory Mankiw, late of the Bush administration, has made publicly and freely available (good for him) a paper entitled ‘Defending the One Percent‘.

Yeah, I know. Still, inequality is a political issue and as such, may be debated on all sides. After a brief (worthless) fable about perfect equality and iPods and Harry Potter, Mankiw goes on to note that his following discussion of inequality is inescapably political:

At the outset, it is worth noting that addressing the issue of rising inequality necessarily involves not just economics but also a healthy dose of political philosophy. We economists must recognize not only the limits of what we know about inequality’s causes, but also the limits on the ability of our discipline to prescribe policy responses. Economists who discuss policy responses to increasing inequality are often playing the role of amateur political philosopher (and, admittedly, I will do so in this essay). Given the topic, that is perhaps inevitable. But it is useful to keep in mind when we are writing as economists and when we are venturing beyond the boundaries of our professional expertise. (pp. 2-3)

Yes, yes you should, Professor Mankiw. And yet you went ahead anyway.

So onward he goes, into familiar tales about efficiency and utility and disutility and productivity and consumption, and, unfortunately, into the increasingly-familiar tales about genetics and intelligence (and productivity, natch) and then, oops, he gets confused and in the end says it doesn’t much matter after all, so, okay.

And then we get the charming personal anecdote:

By contrast, the educational and career opportunities available to children of the top 1 percent are, I believe, not very different from those available to the middle class. My view here is shaped by personal experience. I was raised in a middle-class family; neither of my parents were college graduates. My own children are being raised by parents with both more money and more education. Yet I do not see my children as having significantly better opportunities than I had at their age. (pp. 8-9)

Yes, because everything was great back then and is exactly the same now.

Then Okun and Mirrlees and utilitarianism, a feint toward neuroscience, a jab at redistributionists (‘if you’re not willing to do it globally, you shouldn’t do it nationally’), and then a discussion of the role of factors such as height in compensation—tall folks earn more—but that totally doesn’t mean anything ha ha forget it.

Then he gets into the left critique of inequality. After noting that, “It is, I believe, hard to square the rhetoric of the left with the economist’s standard framework”, he suggests that

Someone favoring greater redistribution along the lines of Okun and Mirrlees would argue as follows. “The rich earn higher incomes because they contribute more to society than others do. However, because of diminishing marginal utility, they don’t get much value from their last few dollars of consumption. So we should take some of their income away and give it to less productive members of society. While this policy would cause the most productive members to work less, shrinking the size of the economic pie, that is a cost we should bear, to some degree, to increase utility for society’s less productive citizens.” (p. 15)

Mankiw then admits this would “surely not animate the Occupy crowd!”  But instead of dealing with the political arguments of ‘the Occupy crowd’, he detours into tax policy.

Now, tax policy is clearly political, and it clearly has economic effects, so you might think I should cut Mankiw a break and say, Hey, this is an area in which his economic expertise is relevant.

I will not so cut, because by detouring into tax policy he is eliding the central political claims of said Occupy crowd and sundry other leftists. They—we—are less concerned with tax policy per se than with basic claims of fairness and representation. Economics in general and tax experts in particular can offer useful models and information about how best to achieve this or that goal of fairness (not so much about representation), but in terms of adjudicating fairness itself, that is a political matter.

(n.b. I’m all hepped up on this stuff because I’ve been teaching Bernard Crick’s In Defence of Politics, wherein he notes, among other things, that treating citizens as if they were simply so many productive cogs in a socioeconomic machine is to erase politics altogether. Which is bad. Very bad.)

Where was I? Oh, yeah, another personal observation from Mankiw:

The key issue is the extent to which the high incomes of the top 1 percent reflect high productivity rather than some market imperfection. This question is one of positive economics, but unfortunately not one that is easily answered. My own reading of the evidence is that most of the very wealthy get that way by making substantial economic contributions, not by gaming the system or taking advantage of some market failure or the political process. (p. 17)

Uh huh, well that settles it then.

Then on to President Obama’s you-didn’t-make-it-on-your-own claim—again, one which could be taken as an economic claim but which, in context, is clearly political—and we’re off to a discussion on infrastructure and margins and transfer payments and ta da:

In the end, the left’s arguments for increased redistribution are valid in principle but dubious in practice. (p. 19)

Now, sorry for shouting, but: THIS IS A POLITICAL ARGUMENT MASQUERADING AS AN ECONOMIC ONE.

I happen not to groove to this particular political argument, but I accept that it is a political argument and thus may claim a role in the political arena. What I do not accept is that this is some kind of neutral economic argument which by nature of it neutral economic-ness ought trump in the political arena.

I’m going to spare all of us his discussion of the veil of ignorance and a market in kidneys (Christ!) and his notion of ‘just desserts’ fiscal policy (another political argument) to get to this beaut:

My disagreement with the left lies not in the nature of their arguments, but rather in the factual basis of their conclusions. (p. 21)

Well, I guess the first part of that statement is true, insofar as he didn’t truly engage those arguments.

And then he comes to a conclusion with which (cue angelic music) I can agree:

Economists can turn to empirical methods to estimate key parameters, but no amount of applied econometrics can bridge this philosophical divide. (p. 22)

That’s called politics, baby, and no amount of econometric hand-waving can wave away those basic disputes about fairness, representation, and the purpose and worth of government.

Economics has its place, even in politics, but it is no substitute for politics: If you want to make a political argument, then make the political argument, and don’t pretend otherwise.

h/t Mark Gongloff, HuffPo


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We don’t need no education

27 05 2013

If your local  high school students thought Martin Luther King had something to do with slavery or never heard of Abraham Lincoln, you’d probably think, Huh, that’s a pretty lousy school.

And if those local school students attended a school  in a community in which education is required only through the 8th grade?

Would you think, My, isn’t it wonderful that the oppressive state isn’t forcing that nice community to teach anything contrary to their values?

Or maybe, How marvelous that parents retain the right to so completely control their children that those children are utterly unequipped to find their own way in the world, and are thus effectively prevented from ever leaving the community?

It’s even better when they get state support for such community-building. . . .


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Lord, I was born a ramblin’ man

13 05 2013

So, shit happened and it wasn’t awful and it wasn’t unexpected but it’s still shit and I need to just deal with it but before I deal with it I need to breathe and say Yep, shit happened and it wasn’t awful and it wasn’t unexpected and it can in fact be dealt with and I will in fact deal with it but first I need to breathe.

Oh, and when NPR tells you that the story about rhinoceros horn smuggling includes audio that might upset some listeners TURN THAT SHIT OFF or you will end up listening to a rhino crying as it tries to escape poachers and goddammit a crying rhino will ruin your whole damned evening and make your anti-capital-punishment self want to kill every last poacher if that’s what needs to be done to save the rhinos and elephants and lions and tigers and bears.

Oh my.


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Helpless, helpless, helpless

11 04 2013

Useless.

As David Brown at the Washington Post wrote,

A clinical experiment involving 1,300 premature infants at two dozen hospitals “failed to adequately inform parents” of the risks of the treatment, which included blindness, brain damage and death, according to a watchdog agency at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Where the hell was the Institutional Review Board (IRB)? If they do nothing else, IRB’s are to ensure that risks are clearly and correctly spelled out in the consent form.

“The consent form was written in a slanted way,” said Jerry A. Menikoff, director of the Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP), which found that the study was “in violation of the regulatory requirements for informed consent” required by federal law.

“They went out of their way to tell you that your kid might benefit,” he said in an interview. “But they didn’t give the flip side, which is that there is a chance your kid might end up worse off. You can’t have it both ways.”

To repeat, where the hell was the IRB?

They don’t design studies, don’t enroll subjects, don’t collect data; the IRB is there to review the study, make sure it is valid and designed to reveal reliable results, scrutinize the risk/benefit tradeoffs, and make sure the consent form gives potential subjects sufficient information of all of the above so that they can make an informed decision of whether or not to participate.

Absent that information, it cannot be said that subjects gave informed consent.

The study was an important one—what is the optimal range of oxygen to be given to premature infants to ensure survival—and apparently yielded significant results which will lead to changes in the treatment of preemies. That good information was extracted from the research does not, however, justify the slipshod manner in which subjects were enrolled.

The consent form made a big point that all babies would get oxygen within the “acceptable” range of 85 to 95 percent. It noted that babies in the lower range might have less eye damage. But it didn’t mention that those in the higher range might have more eye damage. And there was no mention that in the days before oximetry — when oxygen was measured more crudely — that premature infants that got higher concentrations of oxygen tended to have greater survival, although often at the cost of their eyesight.

Instead, the only risk the consent form mentioned was skin irritation from the oximeter device, a trivial problem.

What wasn’t made clear to parents was that the study created two groups of babies with different treatments — although both fell within “standard of care” treatment — for which the researchers expected there would be different outcomes. That was the point of the study.

No mention of serious risk. No clear discussion of differential treatment. These are basic basic basic components of any minimally-decent informed consent form.

People associated with SUPPORT defended the consent form and noted that it was approved by 23 “institutional review boards’” (IRBs), which are the committees each research hospital must have to oversee the design and ethics of medical studies involving human beings.

“I don’t have any regrets. Everybody went into this with their best intention. Nobody was trying to deceive anybody,” said Neil N. Finer, a neonatologist at the University of California at San Diego who ran the trial.

Excuse me while I scream GOOD INTENTIONS ARE NOT ENOUGH! It is not about the intentions of the researchers, but about their actions and, importantly, about the well-being of the subjects themselves.

Those IRBs should be re-organized, re-constituted, and all members and researchers retrained as to the conduct of ethical research.

Because this, this ain’t it.


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Rage against the machine

20 03 2013

*Update* Check out Conor Friedersdorf’s review of anti-anti-war commentary.

I don’t even remember why I was against the war.

It’s easy, now, after the lies and mess and blood and money and vengeance and torture and horror and exodus, to say What a monstrous disaster.

Did I see all of this coming? I don’t know. I was skeptical, fearful of the what-ifs, but did I foresee the monster we would become, the disaster we would inflict on ourselves and the people of Iraq?

I doubt it. I doubt it.

I don’t feel vindicated for having been right. I didn’t have to argue myself into skepticism, didn’t have to fight my way past the shiny objects dangled in front of the American people in order to arrive at the summit of wisdom.

There was no summit, and I claim no wisdom. Is it really that hard to be skeptical of unnecessary war?

This is why I rage and despair in equal measure at those pundits who say “I was wrong, but I could have been right, so. . . .” They couldn’t be bothered to perform the most basic act of citizenship: to think, to think beyond one’s desires and sorrows and glee—and you betcher ass there was glee at the prospect of war—about what we were, truly about to do. Could they not be bothered to wonder at their own anticipation?

I am ungenerous in my interpretation of the commentators who supported the war, ungenerous in my reception to their ex post facto “soul-searching”; I read their apologies as justifications.

This is unfair (at least to John Cole), but I don’t care. They lost nothing by being wrong, suffered no consequences for whooping it up as the Congress and the Bush administration led us into destruction. They are sorry only that the destruction was inglorious, rather than shockingly awesome.

Again, this is unfair, I know, I know.

And it puts too much on the sideliners, not enough on the Congress and the Bush administration. I vent my rage at the pundits because I despair of influencing the politicians.

Once a president decides to go to war, that’s it, we’re going to war.

Pundits make the pitch easier; protesters are, if not ignored, a useful foil. But, truly, nothing any of us says, matters. We don’t matter, except, perhaps, to ourselves.

If a president wants war, war is what we get.


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Brooklyn: Represent!

3 02 2013

Brooklyn College, actually, but close enough.

The brief story (or not so brief) is that the Political Science Department at Brooklyn College is sponsoring an event put together by the Students for Justice in Palestine on the Boycott-Divest-Sanctions movement (directed against Israel). Torture apologist and local-boy-gone-bad Alan Dershowitz howled about the injustice of this event (then suggested all could be made better were only other voices—hm, I wonder whose?—were brought in for “balance”), then various local politicians entered the fray, including a number of City Council members who oh-so-helpfully reminded* Brooklyn College President Karen Gould that:

A significant portion of the funding for CUNY schools comes directly from the tax dollars of the people of the State and City of New York. Every year, we legislators are asked for additional funding to support programs and initiatives at these schools and we fight hard to secure those funds. Every one of those dollars given to CUNY, and to Brooklyn College, means one less dollar going to some other worthy purpose. We do not believe this program is what the taxpayers of our City—and many who would feel targeted and demonized by this program—want their tax money to be spent on.

To which one can only politely reply: Fuck you. Twice.

Happily, President Karen Gould has defended both the department and the principle of academic freedom—rather too rare, these days.

I admit that I am not particularly a supporter of the BDS movement, largely because I think those who act on behalf of human rights in Israel and Palestine should be supported, not abandoned. But, as I wrote to the various politicians who signed these terrible letters, I see less threat to academic freedom in the airing of opinions with which I disagree than in the pressure applied by public officials on institutions to distant themselves from even the consideration of those views.

Not as pithy as Fuck you, but, y’know. . . .

~~~

*You really need to click on this second link. The first letter, by Congressman Jerome Nadler, et al, is bad enough, but the second, by Lew Fidler and nine other City Council members, calls the event speakers Judith Butler and Omar Barghouti “either anti-semitic or simply ignorant” who promote “the worst kind of hate.”

Unsurprisingly, they end with the reverse-double-flipspeak: “We believe in the principle of academic freedom. However, we also believe in the principle of not supporting schools whose programs we, and our constituents, find to be odious and wrong.”

Yeah, no.


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Hit me with your best shot

21 01 2013

This is a problem:

“The worst injury I ever got, in terms of pain, was breaking my collarbone,” says Atlanta Falcons defensive tackle Jonathan Babineaux. “That was in high school. I remember exactly what caused it. I had some new shoulder pads and they didn’t fit right. So I went to make a tackle on a big guy, and I broke my collarbone in two places. And it was excruciating pain. I’ve gotten injured on every level I’ve played at. In college, I broke my ankle. I mean, it was hanging. And three or four years ago, I tore my biceps. My ankle hurt when I broke it. But it didn’t have no comparison to the collarbone. I was lying there, and my first thought was Can I do this? Can I handle this kind of pain?”

And then, at almost the same moment, in almost the same breath, came his second thought: “How long am I going to be out, and will it jeopardize me playing football again?”

It wasn’t the injury that was decisive then, or even the pain. It was Jonathan Babineaux’s thought, that arousal of instinct pitched halfway between survival and suicide. Like every other player in the NFL, he’s been selected at every level along the way for his size, strength, speed, skill, and level of aggression. But like every other player in the NFL he’s also been selected for something else: that first desperate thought when he suffered his first injury at the outer limits of his endurance. Somewhere in every football player’s career, pain offers a way out. The football player who makes it to the NFL is the one who understands from the start that what pain is really offering is a way in.

I’ve long been a football fan, cheering first the Packers, then the Badgers, then both. I fell off the Packers for some years, but jumped back on the fanwagon while living in Albuquerque and going to the Packer bar with T. and her then-husband became a Sunday ritual.

It didn’t hurt, of course, that the Packers began their resurgence around then, first with Dan “Magic Man” Majowski and then with footloose Brett Favre. It was fun to hang out and drink beer and yell at the t.v.; it was fun when the team won. And then when I moved back to Minneapolis, well, nothing like living in the land of the opponent to fire up one’s fandom.

This fell off again while I lived in Montreal and never really picked back up. I still caught college and pro games while in Somerville and checked out the sports pages after I moved to Brooklyn, but while I was happy the Packers won the Superbowl in 2011, it was just sort of . . . a nice feeling, nothing more.

This was good, actually. I hated the downside to following a team: the hollow-pit feeling after a blown game or frustration with the fumbles and dropped balls. I hated that I was caught up in something over which I had no control.

Except, of course, I did have control: I could stop watching. And so I did.

I still paid attention, however, still checked the scores and followed the fortunes of the players, until two more misgivings tamped down even that mild enthusiasm.

One was an old twinge. You remember my sense that brand loyalty is for suckers? Well, what the hell was I doing cheering for one corporation in their competition with another? Yes, the Pack is publicly owned, but they play in corporate league with is all about “brand”; isn’t fandom just another word for sucker?

And the effect of the sports complex on universities, Jesus, what a mess. Football and basketball coaches are routinely paid more than college presidents, and certainly more than any professor, while the players, who are allegedly benefitting from their “free” education, are often just working for free without being educated. Even before Sandusky and Notre Dame abandoning Elizabeth Seeberg so as to protect a football player from her accusations of assault, it was clear that the need to nurture a sporting culture mattered more to the institutions of the NCAA than the need to nurture an intellectual culture.

So just get rid of it. I’d really like to bust up the NCAA and reduce all sports to intramural status, but that’ll never happen. What could happen, perhaps, would be to turn the major sports programs into minor league teams (associated with the universities, if you really want, but no longer a part of them), and let the NFL and NBA (and NHL) pay the  coaches and, of course, the players.

Still, that doesn’t deal with the second, newer, concern: that football (and likely hockey) are really fucking dangerous sports. Football used to joke about “gladiator battles”; now, that ain’t so funny. Players subject themselves to broken bones and torn ligaments and traumatic brain injury and it’s all somehow okay because they get paid to do so.

Money washes away all sins.

This notion that they’re grown men and they know what they’re getting into is, in a word, bullshit. Consider this tidbit from the afore-linked Tom Junod Esquire piece:

“It goes back to pee-wee ball,” Ryan Clark says. “When I was six, I was a punt returner on my dad’s team. I got hurt. I went up and told him, ‘Dad, I can’t straighten my neck.’ But I made sure I told him that after I returned a punt for a touchdown.”

You don’t suddenly become a pro football player at 22; no, the process starts long before that, in pee-wee ball, then junior-high ball, high school, and college. You begin to shape yourself into a football player long before you have any sense of the consequences of doing so, such that after a certain point you, like Ryan Clark, have been

fused by pain and blood to a way of playing the game that fuses the cardinal rules of the NFL — that indeed sees them as inextricable:”If you can go, you go.

“Play hard, play tough, and hit anything that moves.”

Clark is almost certainly not an outlier, Consider Jason Taylor, profiled by Dan Le Batard in The Miami Herald:

He had torn tissues in the bottom of both of [his feet]. But he wanted to play. He always wanted to play. So he went to a private room inside the football stadium.

“Like a dungeon,” he says now. “One light bulb swaying back and forth. There was a damp, musty smell. It was like the basement in Pulp Fiction.”

The doctors handed him a towel. For his mouth. To keep him from biting his tongue. And to muffle his screaming.

“It is the worst ever,” he says. “By far. All the nerve endings in your feet.”

That wasn’t the ailment. No, that was the cure. A needle has to go in that foot, and there aren’t a lot of soft, friendly places for a big needle in a foot. That foot pain is there for a reason, of course. It is your body screaming to your brain for help. A warning. The needle mutes the screaming and the warning.

“The first shot is ridiculous,” Taylor says. “Ridiculously horrible. Excruciating.”

But the first shot to the foot wasn’t even the remedy. The first shot was just to numb the area … in preparation for the second shot, which was worse.

“You can’t kill the foot because then it is just a dead nub,” he says. “You’ve got to get the perfect mix [of anesthesia]. I was crying and screaming. I’m sweating just speaking about it now.”

How’d he play?

“I didn’t play well,” he says. “But I played better than my backup would have.”

I was going to say, Where’s the fucking union for these abused workers?!—but, of course, the union is complicit. They might be named a “players union”, but really, they’re there to make sure the guys on the field get paid, not that they don’t get hurt.

It’s a fucking racket.

The football field is a workplace and the players, workers, but unlike other workers the dangers of the conditions of their workplace are not only dismissed with a they-know-what-they’re-getting-into wave of the hand, but actively celebrated. And those whose apparently-not-serious injuries take them out of the game? Pussies.

I know this country as a whole doesn’t care much about its workers, and workplace protections for, say, slaughterhouse workers and miners have been eviscerated in our bottom-feeding quest for competitiveness and profits, but Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, do we really have to cheer for men to get hurt?

Because that’s exactly what we’re doing when we watch these large and fast men crash into one another.

One final note. Although I’d been reading about concussions and brain injuries among football issues since, well, since it became news, I didn’t necessarily connect it to my own viewing habits. It wasn’t until Ta-Nehisi Coates, a former Cowboys fan, began to take this apart a coupla’ years ago that I began to consider the moral dimensions of my fandom.

I don’t know that I would have gotten over the hump on this without that prodding—and do note, he was speaking only for himself, not making recommendations to others—but I am now at the point that, like him, while I can still wonder at the players’ athleticism, I can no longer overlook the brutality of the so-called game.


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I can see you in the morning when you go to school

18 12 2012

Have I mentioned recently my. . . delight? satisfaction? relief—yes, let’s go with relief—that I live in New York City?

That’s because I don’t have to worry about my governor or mayor suggesting that teachers lock-and-load prior to entering the classroom.

Is it really any surprise that Texas Governor Rick Perry or Virginia Gov Bob McDonnell muses that the appropriate response to gun violence on school ground would be to increase the number of guns on those same school grounds?

Didn’t think so.

Cienna Madrid at The Stranger posted this response from a schoolteacher friend to similar musings:

Kids steal anything that isn’t nailed down in my classroom. In this school year alone, I’ve “lost”: 2 staplers, 12 whiteboard markers, 1 globe, 1 map, 1 copy of The Color Purple, 3 boxes of staples, countless pens and pencils, an apple, my deskplate, and a years’ supply of tacks. If I yawned long enough, these kids would pluck the fillings right out of my mouth and this guy thinks I should have a GUN in the CLASSROOM? Where the fuck would I securely keep a gun? Because I’m sure as shit not packing one on my person. and even if teachers are allowed to carry guns, then what? We’re all supposed to take marksmanship classes to learn how to shoot the damn things? How is this anything but a cheap way of turning teachers into unsworn police officers?

No. No. No. Teachers teach. Police officers police. And legislators are supposed to legislate. Maybe instead of trying to add to the burden of my jobs, legislators should take a crack at doing theirs.

I’m not worried about my students—who are not kids—stealing from me, but I”m right there on the whole “teachers teach” bit: that’s what we do, that’s the whole point of us.

Imma gonna go out on a limb here and speculate that those who want teachers to pack heat probably don’t, really, respect us.  As commenter Sly at Lawyers, Guns & Money pointed out,

According to conservative orthodoxy, I’m a parasite on the public’s dime who is only interested in indoctrinating the precious children of America into communism or atheism or whatever. I can’t be trusted to have any control over the curriculum I teach. I can’t be trusted to fairly and impartially evaluate my students, let alone my colleagues. I can’t be trusted to have collective bargaining rights. I can’t be trusted to have an objective view of governmental policy when it comes to my own profession.

But they’ll trust me to keep a gun in a room filled with children.

Allow me to add to the rant by noting that not only do they not respect teachers, they don’t respect what we do. Maybe they don’t respect us because they don’t respect teaching, maybe they don’t respect teaching because it’s performed by, y’know, teachers—but whatever the arrows of causality, they don’t bother to understand the first goddamned thing about teaching.

And what is that first goddamned thing? Teaching is work. It’s fucking hard work to try to do well and, on some days, just to not do it poorly.

I just finished the last session of a course which had kicked my ass all semester. It was the first time I taught this course, and as often happens with a new course, all of those things which seemed like good ideas while preparing the syllabus turn out to be bad or unworkable ideas as the semester progressed. About halfway through it became clear that things were falling apart, and about two-thirds of the way through I’d figured out how I could improve things for next semester, but in the meantime I had to try to salvage what I could so that the class wasn’t a complete waste of time.

Do you know what it’s like to know that you’re failing—that you’ve failed–but the best you can do is to try to prevent the failure from bursting into flames and immolating what few nuggets you did manage to pass along? Yeah, it sucks.

I’m actually pretty fortunate in that most of the time, I’m jazzed rather than drained by what happens in the classroom, but either way, it’s work. I think about and prepare and rethink and revise and prepare some more, all so that my students can get something out of the course, which in turn means that I can get something out of teaching them.

But hey, if what I do doesn’t matter, then all of that time spent pretending as if it does could better be spent at the firing range doing the real work of shredding paper targets or at SWAT camp learning how to somersault through a hail of bullets and turn up rightside firing at my attacker(s).

I’m a teacher, not a ninja, and that should be enough.


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It’s gone, gone, gone, and it’s never coming back

15 11 2012

File this under “oh for fuck’s sake!”

All City University of New York campuses were closed that Monday-Thursday of the storm, and although weekend classes were held beginning that Friday, most of us didn’t return to work until the following week.

Fine.

The different campuses/CUNY had to decide what to do with that missing week, whether to adjust schedules, extend the semester, write off the time off, etc.

Again, fine. A missed week of instruction is a serious matter, so considering how to deal with it is reasonable.

However.

Not everything can be fixed. There have been suggestions about assigning students extra work, making up classes at another time, scheduling activities outside of the class, which again, while not unreasonable, lead me to that exasperated ohforfuck’ssake.

I put a lot of work into my syllabus, and losing that week matters to me, but it is precisely because I put a lot of thought into the semester’s schedule that I find the suggestions that I shoehorn something extra in just. . . y’know, to pretend that the lost week was not, in fact, lost, really crisps my nippers.

I’m being churlish, I know, and the suggestions offered are not necessarily bad ones, but honest to pete, do administrators really think that either instructors or students can somehow add hours to the week? Do they not understand that students (and their laaaaarrge contingent workforce) have other commitments that might just conflict with the make-up time? Do they in fact think that time is fungible, such that the hours not used during that lost week can somehow be plucked out and glued on to the weeks following?

*grumble mumble piss moan sniff*

The week is gone gone gone daddy gone, and unless my campus is willing to extend the semester a week, we should just say sayonara and be done with it. Anything else is mere Potemkin pedagogy.


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Sick of it all

15 08 2012

I would like to blame August, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, libertarians, alarm clocks, weak coffee, and the harpsichord for my tummy-ache, but that would not be fair.

Not that I care about fair when I’m sick, but even I know that these things cause headaches, not tummy-aches.


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